If you don’t already, you should go and subscribe to the British Museum Youtube channel immediately. One Saturday breakfast time a couple of weeks ago I watched the video of Tom Scott playing this game against Irving Finkel.

Now. A couple of weeks earlier, after making some firewood dice, we’d been playing with making firewood platonic solids. Tetrahedron, Cube, Octahedra… that kind of stuff. As you do.

So we sketched out the board on a sheet of paper, grabbed the big tub of dice, and started playing. It’s a fun game. We only had two wooden tetrahedra, so we used some blank dice with three dot faces and three blank faces to match the probabilities of the tetrahedra.

Robin appears to be quite good at it.

So we then move the board onto a left over chunk of oak flooring and start hitting it with chisels and whittling knives.

We also started making little dice and counters. These dice are effectively coins, and are hard to pick up. Having four of them means you can score 0,1,2,3 or 4 – which makes a change from 1-6. Burr from the log pile, plus saw, plus sandpaper = tetrahedral dice.

It’s not finished yet – but it’s a fun game. You should make one.

Quick sidebar on buying game bits. For maybe £20 you can stock up a tub with dice, counters, meeples, and other game components. Having these handy for this kind of thing on a saturday morning is fun – if the wee lads are into a new game, or want to add a feature to an existing game, being able to quickly mock them up is great. If you wait until the bits arrive the interest will have passed and life is pointless.

Enjoying reasonably meaty books and trying to get through one a week is a little conflicted. Homo Deus is a brilliantly puzzling book. It needs some time to play with. Some time to decide which bits are nonsense and which bits are likely.

12 The Looking Glass War, John le Carré
Wow this is depressing. People!

13 We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
Disgracefully I only read this because it was on a list of short books that are any good. Rattled through this quickly – great book. I should likely read something a bit more fun though.

14 Against Everything, Mark Grief
Another essay collection. I found the tone a little grating, although plenty to think about. Much preferred the voice in Known and Strange Things.

15 The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
The ending could have been a little more distantly handled I think. Felt a little spelled out. I don’t know. Delightful book though.

16 Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari
I’ve spoken about and recommended this book more than anything since Sapiens (and probably SPQR) last year. It didn’t go where I thought it would. It’s probably a third longer than it needs to be.

18 A Sticky Note Guide to Life, Chaz Hutton
The internet is wonderful. A book by this guy.

19 Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware, Andy Hunt
My first re-read of the whole bookaweek thing. I think it’s maybe five years since I read this. Surprising how much that was surprising the first time round is just ‘the natural order of things’ this time round.

Firewood is weird stuff. It’s wood, from a tree, but we just throw it in the fire to warm us up. I wonder if a tree would rather be firewood or a table.

We get a load of wood in late summer, stack it in the garage, and slowly turn it back into dust and gas and heat through the winter. The mix of woods is always a bit random. Half hardwood, half softwood. There’s usually some birch, beech, oak, ash and others I couldn’t hope to identify. It’s fun to stack it and see the variation and similarity. You can pretend you’re at Walden Pond. It’s the exact opposite of sitting at a computer. It’s nice.

When we started the boardgame a month thing – the boys and I went to the garage and started making some firewood cubes. They wanted to make a different version of Bang!, so while we waited for the blank dice to arrive from ebay we made our own. Home made is more fun – they are wonky, they are unfair, and they are a little disconcerting to use.

They also just look wonky.

We haven’t used any oils / varnish on them. We ‘nut’ them. Rub a Brazil nut on them to give them a little sheen and stop them getting dirty.

The boys spent a while calibrating the dice. Figuring out which numbers were more likely to come up by rolling them again and again. They got to use saws. They learned about different grits of sandpaper, and how the order in which you use them matters. How preparation at early stages pays off by making later stages easier and quicker. They got to burn themselves on a soldering iron to do the wood burning of the dice dots. They also got to not just play a cool game, but make their own cool game out of a log that would have gone in the fire.

This whole X a Y thing is addictive. Reading a book a week is fun. In addition, as a family, we appear to be trying a new board game a month in 2017. This should be easier. We love a bit of Carcassonne, Chess or Junk Art. Trying a few more games should be fun.

Deal a deck of cards from a MASSIVE tin box of cards, with all kinds of shushi on them. Pick a card you want to keep, and pass the rest of your cards to your right. Repeat. Do you try to make high scoring combos, or just keep high scoring individual cards? Do you aim high and risk collapse, or play safe and hope for the best? Do you play your own game or try and block your brother? Great value considering the sheer amount of variation in the game, the number of cards, and the nice tin.

Roll some dice, to score points, strike opponents, and other stuff. You play a sheriff, or an outlaw, or something. You have to try and kill your opponent. Some nice character cards, neat dice, and really fun quick game play that even the most distracted five year old will grasp in seconds. Also, wild west theme. Fun. Nice small box too, so good to tuck in the suitcase/car as an emergency rainy day half hour filler.

King of Tokyo is the current head a shoulders leader of the boardgames. Parasitic Tentacles causes the odd grumpy battle – but on the whole it’s a perfectly balanced game for <10s. Just complicated enough to hold interest, without overloading the players with too many contradictory factors. Collect energy, buy power ups, earn victory points, try not to lose too many health points. The power up cards are really well done – full of character and the boys love just finding out what’s next in the stack.

We had fun making computers speak a little like humans, in useful ways. I was on a team this time, with Alan and Bianca. Which was fun.

Our project was around using chatbot interfaces as the only way to create meetings in a business setting. Instead of just being able to slap a meeting into someones Google Calendar, you have to negotiate access with their chatbot protector. I think this could actually contribute to the bottom line in a lot of businesses – and be a resilient, reliable, robust reminder of how things should be for people.

Browsers remember what you visit – allowing you to get to sites without typing the whole url. This is awesome. It’s well known. As I get increasingly impatient I find that a side effect of this is that any site that requires more than a single key stroke before hitting return is just annoying to visit. Two isn’t too bad (t-h-return for the guardian). More is now really painful.

Since I’ve started using goodreads.com a bit more it is genuinely frustrating me that I have to type gee oh oh dee return to escape the Google. That’s a whole five keystrokes to visit a website. I should really invoke some alfred goodness.

Blogging the books I’ve read is a little odd. But I’ve started now so I’m going to keep it up. Habit > Logic and all than. Blogging like it’s 2001 again. I write these down so I’ll remember them, I think. Prettier list with covers and such on goodreads.

1 Human Acts, Kang Han
A far less depressing ending than I was expecting. Reasonably sure it needs a re-read.